JOEL OTTERSON: Chandelier Queer at Maloney Fine Art The Urban Dictionary defines Chandelier Queer as “an elegant fag. A self-spoiled fruit, “ as though excess of any kind denotes sexual preference, and perhaps chandeliers are a “real red flag,” (still probably not a...
Licketh The Rainbow at JAUS Rainbows sometimes make me cringe—not that I am inherently opposed to their beauty and deeper metaphoric meaning, but in the wrong hands, they can fall so easily into triteness. Tricky little things those rainbows can be, however the...
Since she began her career as a photojournalist at the age of 16, Newsha Tavakolian has been capturing the essence of the modern-day Iranian experience through poignant photographs that challenge Western perceptions of the women of the Islamic Republic, while alluding...
Michael Landy is hardly the kind of artist you would expect to see named artist in residence at London’s National Gallery. For one thing, he’s a charter member of the Young British Artists made famous by Damien Hirst’s legendary "Freeze" exhibition. Known for their...
Zackary Drucker & Manuel Vason at Luis De Jesus Gallery Performance/video artist Zackary Drucker and London-based photographer Manuel Vason have teamed up to create a series of self-reflexive and sometimes enigmatic images shot in Milan in 2010 during one of Drucker’s...
Kim Rugg at Mark Moore Gallery Kim Rugg dismantles and reassembles things—mostly words and images, including newspaper articles, magazines, cereal boxes, stamp and now maps. “Rendering their original content meaningless,” Rugg teases out new and sometimes...
Martin Mull, “State of the Union,” 2013. Oil on linen, 50 x 60in Martin Mull at Samuel Freeman Accurately representing the human experience in this day and age presents unusual complications—mainly because the business of being alive today is painful on a collective...
“Western Noir,” an exhibition featuring Eric Nash's newest paintings are currently on view at Skidmore Contemporary Art at Bergamot Station in Santa Monica. At first glance, his work brings to mind “Old Hollywood” featuring a youthful, yet noir-infused Los Angeles:...
In Scott Stark’s The Realist—fresh off premieres at the Toronto and New York film festivals, and screening later this month as part of a REDCAT nano-retrospective of Stark’s three-plus decades of tenacious experimentalism—a gaga pair of drop-dead gorgeous...
The title of Iva Gueorguieva’s show “Spill/Frame” seemed almost a naked admission of its strategies and ambition with a concomitant risk of crashing, careening failure. In almost all of the works on view there was both a willful, self-imposed notion of the edge or,...
Fragmented and contorted bodies in motion span the gallery as if onstage in Bettina Hubby’s exhibition “Pretty Limber.” Large-scale figures made of vinyl decals float across the space, wrapping around corners and emerging from the floor. Composited from numerous...
Through a process of intellectual, historical and geographic research, Alex Slade makes evident, and critiques thereby, the social forces that shape the American landscape. Landscape-oriented American photographers have been preoccupied with this issue since the...
The “Never Built” exhibition at the Architecture and Design (A+D) Museum on Wilshire unearths gems from Southern California’s architectural history. The idea originated in 2009, and its extensive research and carefully curated selection by Greg Goldin and Sam Lubell...
In Irene Hardwicke Olivieri’s Subterranean Family (2013), a large woman crouches, her body sinking into the earth, weighed down by a patchwork of introspective self-images. One curls in a sphinx-like pose, her feline tail circling behind her back, as she clutches a...
“Speaking Tongues (The material of communication)” introduces Duane Paul's considerable talent and ability in the artist's first solo exhibition. The show’s 12 works (all 2013) are divided into three sections or “dialect clusters:” six works on paper, two...
The buzz around San Francisco’s new art hub—near the Design District along a stretch of Utah Street and nearby Potrero—resonates throughout Jack Fischer’s expansive new space. Its inaugural exhibition, “Years of Pretty,” is a mini-retrospective of SF-based Ward...
Witnessing natural disasters, such as Hurricane Katrina, motivated Kevin Yates’ earlier works that employ motifs of reflection and twinning. Doubling continues with uncanny effect in new representations of decaying decorative/architectural elements, inspired by Edgar...
All indications are that Edmund de Waal is a polymath and a scholar. Deferring his place at Cambridge, he apprenticed himself for two years to study ceramics, then graduated with first class honors. In the ’90s he wrote a searching study on Bernard Leach, a prominent...
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